zation cannot afford to pass by these shops, which spring up
in haphazard fashion, not because the country needs them, but because
farmers or traders have children to be provided for. To the ignorant
this is the easiest form of trade, and so many are started in life in
one of these little shops after an apprenticeship in another like it.
These numerous competitors of each other do not keep down prices. They
increase them rather by the unavoidable multiplication of expenses;
and many of them, taking advantage of the countryman's irregularity of
income and his need for credit, allow credit to a point where the small
farmer becomes a tied customer, who cannot pay all he owes, and who
therefore dares not deal elsewhere. These agencies for distribution do
not by their nature enlarge the farmer's economic knowledge. His vision
beyond them to their sources of supply is blocked, and in this respect
he is debarred from any unity with national producers other than his own
class.

Let us now for a little consider the small farmer around whom have
gathered these multitudinous little agencies of distribution. What kind
of a being is he? We must deal with averages, and the small farmer
is the typical Irish countryman. The average area of an Irish farm is
twenty-five acres or thereabouts. There are hundreds of thousands who
have more or less. But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer with
twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a drift
of sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal: call him Patrick
Maloney and accept him as symbol of his class. We will view him outside
the operation of the new co-operative policy, trying to obey the command
to be fruitful and replenish the earth. He is fruitful enough. There is
no race suicide in Ireland. His agriculture is largely traditional. It
varied little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and the
beginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite of
a huge department of agriculture. His butter, his eggs, his cattle,
horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers. He rarely knows where
his produce goes to--whether it is devoured in the next county or is
sent across the Channel. It might be pitched into the void for all he
knows about its destiny. He might be described almost as the primitive
economic cave-man, the darkness of his cave unillumined by any ray of
general principles. As he is obstructed by the traders in a general
visio